At first I was very upset with ATI Radeon support in linux. But after a little bit of magic - it works!!! And the performance is really good.

Let me share my experience.

1) we need kernel 2.6.32-rc3.
I just got config-general-2.6.30.5 from /testing. Made oldconfig. Then I enabled radeon_kms from Device Drivers/Staging

2) because I use LVM and luks, the driver failed to initialize properly during boot. This happens because driver initialises before root is mounted and cannot load proper firmware. Thus I had to blackist driver in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and load it later (I load it from /etc/rc.modules).

3) we need to make an proper environment for X to work with KMS. We need to build (in this order):
1) libdrm - from git
git clone git://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm

The performance is really goot. Switching between VT and X is momental. All the GL staff works.

Hope this could be useful for anyone.

BrZ

10-10-2009 10:03 AM

Thanks for sharing =]

onebuck

10-10-2009 10:21 AM

Hi,

Yes, thanks for sharing.

I would suggest that you place your lists, SlackBuilds and/or long data within the vbcode tags # or quote with identification within. A experienced user will be able to pick things out but the novice will not. Plus it makes things cleaner therefore easier to read.

kukibl

10-10-2009 11:18 AM

Thank you very much, specially for SlackBuilds!:) I was looking for them 2 days ago, had plans to experiment with KMS. No need for that now, since you already did all hard work.;)

It's not just KMS that's starting to run with these, but even more importantly 3D for r600/r700 chips. I have an integrated motherboard with, I believe, RS780 chip, and KWin Desktop effects now works smoothly in OpenGL. On the whole, it's quite stable for me right now and if performance can certainly be improved, it's already enough for a composited desktop.

dolphin77

11-13-2009 05:24 AM

Hello there.

I figured out that with kernel 2.6.32-rc5, rc6 there were a lot of "noise" produced in X under KDE. So for a while I had to stick to -rc3. But today 2.6.32-rc7 was released. It looks like they fixed this issue with "noise production". There are also a lot of various improvements for radeon driver. So for thous who are not afraid of bleeding edge, and who wants to get reasonable performance of radeon opensource driver, there is a good reason to update.

best regards,
Vladimir

rvdboom

11-13-2009 06:53 AM

Nice! I was thinking it came from Mesa or the xfree86-video-ati driver. :-)
Will compile it tonight.

octoberblu3

11-13-2009 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rvdboom
(Post 3755498)

Nice! I was thinking it came from Mesa or the xfree86-video-ati driver. :-)
Will compile it tonight.

Well, to get the whole thing working, you need the latest kernel 2.6.32-rc7, and a couple things from git repositories.

libdrm from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm
compile like the Slackware source SlackBuild with an extra option on configure: --enable-radeon-experimental-api
The extra flag should give you another library libdrm_radeon

xf86-video-ati from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
You can either hack out most of the unneeded stuff from the x11.SlackBuild script, or just make a complete new one from piecing together the configure calls and the like.
The configure should find the new library libdrm_radeon automatically.

mesa from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
Using the stock source SlackBuild, make sure to add r600 to the list of dri drivers to build. The configure script should also find libdrm_radeon automatically.

I copied and modified the original source SlackBuilds to just rsync from the git directory instead of untarring a source tarball.

rsync -aC $CWD/drm/ $PKGNAM-$VERSION

One last thing: if you use an initrd to boot, blacklist the radeon module from automatically loading (unless you build in the radeon module and firmware you need.) Manually load it in later (perhaps in rc.local) with a call like /sbin/modprobe radeon modeset=1

Good luck.

agentdcooper

11-13-2009 03:38 PM

thanks alot for posting this, I've been struggling with intel drivers, but recently noticed there is KMS option for the intel video options in a kernel recompile recently. I am trying some things out with your scripts here + some tweaks, trying to get it working on my ancient intel g45 hardware. anyways, I am in no way trying to thread-jack here, simply want to thank you publicly for posting this, it is very helpful to me in my troubleshooting!

peace

dolphin77

11-13-2009 03:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by octoberblu3
(Post 3755797)

Well, to get the whole thing working, you need the latest kernel 2.6.32-rc7, and a couple things from git repositories.

libdrm from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm
compile like the Slackware source SlackBuild with an extra option on configure: --enable-radeon-experimental-api
The extra flag should give you another library libdrm_radeon

xf86-video-ati from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati
You can either hack out most of the unneeded stuff from the x11.SlackBuild script, or just make a complete new one from piecing together the configure calls and the like.
The configure should find the new library libdrm_radeon automatically.

mesa from git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
Using the stock source SlackBuild, make sure to add r600 to the list of dri drivers to build. The configure script should also find libdrm_radeon automatically.

I copied and modified the original source SlackBuilds to just rsync from the git directory instead of untarring a source tarball.

rsync -aC $CWD/drm/ $PKGNAM-$VERSION

One last thing: if you use an initrd to boot, blacklist the radeon module from automatically loading (unless you build in the radeon module and firmware you need.) Manually load it in later (perhaps in rc.local) with a call like /sbin/modprobe radeon modeset=1

Good luck.

Sorry I didn't get it. Is there any principal difference from post#1 in this thread?

dolphin77

11-15-2009 06:46 PM

An updated info& scripts:

1) KERNEL PART:

In order to make this work, we will need a kernel 2.6.32-rc7 (or later).
It should be compiled with this options in .config:

next step is to blacklist radeon frame buffer and radeon modules. We need to do this to avoid firmware initialization problem, if it is not accessible before root FS is mounted. This should be added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:

Code:

blacklist radeonfb
blacklist radeon

And then we will load module from /etc/rc.d/rc.modules:

Code:

/sbin/modprobe radeon

2) Libdrm, Mesa and xf86-video-ati from git.

In order to get as much as we can from our ATIs with opensource drivers, it is reasonable to play with GIT version of this packages.

mesa.SlackBuild (to save time I build only r600 driver. if you need different one, change DRI_DRIVERS accordingly, or if you want to build all the drivers, remove this line: ( --with-dri-drivers="$DRI_DRIVERS" \)and all the drivers will be built):

Whenever I have the new kernel 2.6.32-rc7 running with your cookbook technique I get a rasterized screen. The 'blacklist radeonfb & blacklist radeon' have been included in the 'blacklist.conf' but invoking 'modprobe radeon' gets a raster screen. Must re-boot.

Heads UP: I noticed in the script '/Soft/dri' that if you setup the directory some users may not be aware that the rest of the scripts should be in that directory. No checking.

I reverted to my original kernel, packages and configurations. I think that a separate install will be easier to see if this can be worked out.

dolphin77

11-18-2009 04:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by onebuck
(Post 3761672)

Hi,

I've been working on this Dell Inspiron 1501 problem for ages now.
I've compiled the 2.6.32-rc7 kernel with your suggested settings.

Followed the Thread/posts, especially #13. I used the recipe to the 'T'. I did include all drivers. Still no joy!

Whenever I have the new kernel 2.6.32-rc7 running with your cookbook technique I get a rasterized screen. The 'blacklist radeonfb & blacklist radeon' have been included in the 'blacklist.conf' but invoking 'modprobe radeon' gets a raster screen. Must re-boot.

Heads UP: I noticed in the script '/Soft/dri' that if you setup the directory some users may not be aware that the rest of the scripts should be in that directory. No checking.

I reverted to my original kernel, packages and configurations. I think that a separate install will be easier to see if this can be worked out.

Hi.

First of all I should say that I am not an expert in graphics, programming and etc. I just spent few crazy weeks with my laptop not working properly (it has ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 - R600 chip). I almost got a nail in my head. But after a lot of googling, reading and etc I finally found workaround for my card. A little bit later all the required things were included in the development version of the kernel. That what I was trying to report and to share with the community. And I think that if it will help at least to one person, my target is reached. If someone spent a lot of time on figuring out something - why should others do the same? they can do something else.

I do not know what kind of chipset is used in your card and the level of its support in kernel driver. But I do not think this is a very new card. And I think it should be supported. What you still can try to do is to remove all the vga options from lilo. As I understand,there could be interference between "old" framebuffers and the new features of radeon driver. Try also too look on phoronix forums.

PS I removed this /Soft/dri from the above. You right it can confuse people.